The Nine Lives of the "Sex Kitten" Are Over

Early today marked the passing of 1950s French icon Brigitte Bardot, who was 91 years old and had mostly been out of the limelight since retiring from films in the early 1970s.  Beginning in 1952 or thereabouts and being the wife of the older (but not THAT much older) director Roger Vadim, she created a sensation in the movie And God Created Woman, a film I have not seen.  Back then, she had a fresh-faced innocence about her plus a great figure (she had been trained as a dancer), so men all over the world drooled over her.  She didn't have that much of a career in film, as I recall.  She was more popular in the gossip columns being linked to this man or that man, a few marriages after Vadim, and at least six suicide attempts, the last one being in 1992, around the time she married her final husband, Bernard d'Ormale, who survives her.  She also had little contact with her son, born in 1960 and raised by his father, and was basically estranged from him and her grandchildren.  

In other words, she achieved icon status in films despite not being all that talented, while she was an absolute mess in her private life.  About the only bright thing about her life was being involved in animal welfare following her retirement from movies although it was  of more the nutso animal "rights" bent ala PeTA rather than supporting the humane treatment of animals.  It could be argued that this activism was consistent, for Bardot was not just eccentric, she was an outright misanthropist.

It was her involvement in far right politics that not just got her into some legal trouble, but the involvement really tarnished her image.  She was a fascist, with her husband d'Ormale having been an advisor to the late far right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928-2025--I may have forgotten to  note his death on this blog), which is as bad as it gets in that country.  She was  racist, she was xenophobic, she was misogynist, and she was homophobic.  She was truly a contemptible person.

Yours truly tried to make those points in various comment sections around Facebook and elsewhere, but still there are people who try to make the argument that none of that really matters.  It is mostly men who are doing it, which should tell you their thinking is  not with their brains.

Bardot was simply not that nice a person, and no amount of sugarcoating it changes it.

In her youth 

She had a younger sister, Marie-Jeanne, stage name of Mijanou Bardot, who was also quite pretty, and who appeared in that notorious 1960 dreck, Sex Kittens Go to College, which had nothing to do with Brigitte.  She is long retired from films and is 87 years old.

PBS obit:

Later, however, she fell from public grace as her animal protection diatribes took on a decidedly extremist tone. She frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.

She was convicted and fined five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred, in incidents inspired by her opposition to the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays.

Bardot's 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d'Ormale, a onetime adviser to far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described Le Pen, an outspoken nationalist with multiple racism convictions of his own, as a "lovely, intelligent man."

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Brigitte sure knew how to pick 'em.